The recent hacking attack against the Houston Astros is a wake-up call for all employers: no organization is safe from its adversaries’ attempts to steal proprietary information to gain a leg up in the competition. The...more

More details continue to emerge about the cyber attack and data breach disclosed last week of the U.S. federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and those details continue to get worse. While original reports...more

Obama administration proposal would reduce legal ambiguities and allow civil RICO claims.
On January 2015, the Obama administration announced a series of proposals to strength­en the country’s response to...more

Almost all healthcare providers and health plan administrators are familiar with the detailed requirements of the privacy and security rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Violations...more

The federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) was primarily intended to deter and punish database hacking by third parties. Employers involved in disputes with former employees have attempted to use CFAA in response to...more

The warning follows the recent Magistrate's Court decision which saw the ICO use its enforcement powers to bring criminal proceedings against a paralegal at a law firm, for unlawfully obtaining personal data. The paralegal...more

As businesses move away from paper documents, courts are poised to broaden ‘conversion’ definition.
The fundamental shift for busi­nesses in the past 15 years from paper documents to computer data has forced the courts...more

Employers need to appreciate and address the fact that employees who remove their employers’ confidential information often do not appear to appreciate the risks of being caught or the potentially very serious consequences of...more

“Web scraping” or “Web harvesting” — the practice of extracting large amounts of data from publicly available websites using automated “bots” or “spiders” — accounted for 18 percent of site visitors and 23 percent of all...more

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Texas recently brought criminal charges under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (“HIPAA”) against a former East Texas hospital employee. The former...more

Employee privacy rights may have received a boost from the U.S. Supreme Court at the end of this year’s term. In Riley v. California, the most recent in a series of criminal search and seizure cases involving technology, the...more

In the waning days of its current term, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in California v. Riley that police officers generally violate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches by conducting a...more

The Supreme Court of the United States released a unanimous decision last week barring law enforcement from searching the mobile phones of individuals placed under arrest without first obtaining a search warrant or the...more

In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this week in Riley v. California that police generally may not conduct a warrantless search of digital data stored on the cell phone of someone who has been arrested. The...more

One of my favorite movies is Bad Day at Black Rock. It is one of the few movies to combine elements of film noir into something approaching a traditional Western. It also attacks directly the prejudice and hate against...more

A terminated employee was convicted of “Mischief to Data” and “Unauthorized use of a Computer” contrary to the Criminal Code after he remotely accessed a former co-worker’s e-mail without her authorization and forwarded...more

Earlier this month, a federal judge in San Francisco sentenced David Nosal to a year in prison, three years’ supervised release, 400 hours of community service, and $60,000 in fines. His crime? Nosal violated the Computer...more

Former Korn/Ferry recruiter David Nosal was sentenced to one year and one day in prison on Wednesday for violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Economic Espionage Act.
In April, a federal jury in...more

On October 16, 2013, a federal judge in New Jersey ruled that Goldman Sachs must advance the legal fees of a former employee charged with stealing Goldman’s source code. The order is the latest twist in a case that...more

On February 28, 2008, Hanjuan Jin, a Chinese-born former software engineer for Motorola, arrived at Chicago O’Hare Airport en route to Beijing. During a random customs check, officials discovered that she had a one-way...more

The Justice Department announced that Johnson & Johnson will pay $1.273 billion to the federal government and most states to settle a civil False Claims Act investigation into its off-label marketing of its antipsychotic drug...more

Whenever an appeals court kicks off a 65-page opinion by describing you (or your client) as a thief, and posits that the question before it is whether you’ve been properly convicted of thievery, you know you’re in trouble. ...more

In all jurisdictions the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), 18 U.S.C. 1030, the federal computer crime statute, applies to former employees who steal data from the company computer, but in two federal circuits it does not...more

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